‘Ferocity’ Brings Florida Noir to Southern Italy

Is there a more convenient plot device than the beautiful dead woman? An object of shared fascination, she sits at the center of a story, silent and inscrutable, ready to play whatever role she is cast in: the homecoming queen, the femme fatale, the nymphomaniac fetish model with a death wish and a coke habit. The best part is that there is no need to choose just one.

“Ferocity,” the 2015 winner of the Strega Prize and the first of the Italian author Nicola Lagioia’s books to be translated into English, begins with a woman, “naked, and ashen, and covered in blood,” stumbling down a highway in the middle of the night. Her toenails are painted with red polish and the bruises on her ribs stand out like ink stains against her paper-white skin. The woman — her name is Clara Salvemini — is the glamorous, good-hearted, and mysteriously self-destructive daughter of a Pugliese construction baron, but her biographical details are the least important thing about her. This is how you introduce an archetype, not a character. In case we miss the point, the truck driver who is the last person to see her alive compares her to the moon.

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After this opening scene, it is possible to predict the remainder of the novel’s plot with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Readers will not be surprised to learn that Clara was involved in an illicit underworld of drugs and sex or that the investigation into her death uncovers a tangled conspiracy that implicates her town’s most respected citizens. The novel is set in Puglia’s capital, the coastal city of Bari, to which Lagioia gives the high-gloss depravity of a Florida noir. Many of the scenes take place in stately villas with French doors leading out onto the patio. There are palm trees, flamingos, magnolias, motorcycles, tanning beds, yacht clubs, orgies, Armani. There are lovely descriptions of the late-afternoon light in southern Italy. There is a lot of cocaine.

Though “Ferocity” adopts the trappings of a stylish thriller, it has the ambitions of a social novel. Here is where Clara’s real usefulness as a device emerges. Like the baseball in Don DeLillo’s “Underworld,” her role is to link characters who would otherwise have been difficult to bring together. Before she was killed, she had been sexually involved with a demographic cross-section of Pugliese society. We meet a chief justice, a government minister, a university chancellor, a gym owner, a construction foreman, and a man in a Spiderman costume handing out fliers outside a toy store. Each is introduced with careful attention to the social and economic conditions that shaped him, and each is given a chance to deliver his own monologue on his frailties and frustrated dreams.

But having assembled this material, Lagioia doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. In place of insight, his characters dispense banalities about globalization (“China. Brazil. Everything happens so fast”) and the facts of industrial pollution. The book’s main target is the corruption of Italy’s ruling class by decades of neoliberal economic policies. This would be a good subject for a novel; but rather than pursue it, “Ferocity” retreats into abstraction. Its message, underscored by the interstitial vignettes of predator and prey in the animal world that punctuate the action, is that life is a jungle. Man is wolf to man. The strong take what they want and the weak suffer — although perhaps it is possible to gain a temporary reprieve from this state through the love of a good woman. Did another beautiful female character have to die just for this?